133arc585

Ah interesting. That is unfortunate.

Isn't there another person who knows how, but just restricts themselves to very specific games? I wonder if there's any way to convince them to help replace the too-far-gone Empress. I understand they probably also don't want to just make the cracking info public, as it would presumably just accelerate the cat-and-mouse game, but perhaps they could be convinced to help bring a new person up to speed? I wonder if they could be convinced by donations to mentor an Empress replacement?

Ah I see they did say seal. I still read it as one of these stickers, but reading it as gasket seems sensible too.

I don't think they're referring to something like a "rubber seal", I think they mean these things:

I don't believe so. A battery standard would specify the interface, not the actual battery design from a technical standpoint. It would specify:

• size and shape, i.e. where connectors go, assuring it fits in a phone
• voltage and amperage provided

The rest is up to the battery manufacturer and is completely open to innovation. You want to put a Li-ion battery in there? Just make it the right shape and as long as it can provide the output required, it's fine. Want some future-tech fusion battery? As long as it's the right shape and puts out the required power!

If you listen to more than one podcast, either

• you visit once a week anyway, and just have podcasts delayed a few days from release to listen, or
• you visit every day that one of the podcasts is released, which means you may be visiting several websites every day.

Some podcasts I like to listen to the day they come out, or perhaps the next day if I don't get to it, such as news podcasts.

Also, if you listen to even more than a few podcasts, you aren't going to "a website" once a week, you're going to a dozen websites once a week.

I just go to the website, download the show, throw it on my phone

That's three steps, per podcast per episode. Not everyone has their phone set up where it's zero-effort to copy files to the phone from their computer, so that may be a multi-step process itself.

Also, podcast apps offer some other features that to do manually either is more work, or more mental overhead:

• Favoriting episodes, so that they stay downloded: to do this manually you need some sort of filesystem hierarchy where you put favorited episodes, or keep a list of favorited episodes, or keep track some other way.
• Notifications for new episodes, for podcasts that don't follow a strict release schedule, or those that put out "special" episodes off their typical release schedule, or even just not having to memorize which podcasts have what release schedules.
• Viewing of "show notes" inline instead of having to open the browser, navigate to the podcast's webpage, then navigate to the episode page.
• Listening software designed for podcasts/human speech: silence trimming, speedup ratios, start/end trimming, smart chapter-based seeking and navigation, remembering where you left off. Some of these features may be available in whatever generic multimedia player you listen to podcasts in, but not all of them.

Of course, a podcast app is not required to listen to podcasts by any means. But if you listen to a lot of podcasts and value time your time, there is undeniable benefit offered by podcast apps.

Also, there are plenty of FOSS and tracker-free podcast apps, so it's not a situation where you must sacrifice privacy for convenience.

Not anymore. As of May 29th, "[n]ew port forwards will no longer be supported, and existing ports will be removed 2023-07-01"--meaning by now, no port forwarding is supported.

So you're acknowledging that form over function, even to the point of making the end user's experience worse with no upside except to Apple in the form of more potential future profits, is so important to Apple that they'd rather pull out of an entire massive market than respect their customer.

Just like you can't get a "nicer looking" microwave that has a completely clear glass front rather than the mesh screen (becasue it's bad for the consumer), and just like you wouldn't accept someone marketing a cell phone that bricks itself after 45 outbound phone calls (because it's bad for the consumer, and the environment), you shouldn't accept Apple being anti-consumer and anti-environment by refusing to allow user serviceability.

Don't allow Apple to externalize environmental costs on to the rest of humanity simply because it'd be ever so slightly less profitable if they can't force consumers into a (needlessly) rapid replacement cycle.

but for graphics in general, the 4th coordinate is important, even if it is “usually” 1.

Who said it isn't? Transformation matrices acting on R^3^ are 4x4 (since transformation matrices acting on R^n^ are of dimension n+1 in general), whether they're full rank or not.

I'm writing this as someone who has not done much with Godot, but from the mathematical standpoint, two Transform3Ds do not commute in general. There are situations in which they will commute, though. If they are both pure rotations, they will commute if their rotation axes are the same.

Edit to add: This was based on thinking about a Transform3D as a transformation matrix acting on R^3^.

Well I'm sorry you can't fathom that there is potential future value in old games. I even said that we can't know the future value of something like this, so the safest thing to do is to just preserve them as well as we can.

Do you disagree with all of the explicit examples of ways it can be valuable that I laid out? Or do you simply want to assert the games are "meaningless" and ignore every way in which value can still be derived, or could be derived in the future, from them?

I suspect you haven't actually thought this through and are just being antagonistic for fun; that's how it comes off, anyway.

So why should the Library of Congress exist? Why should the Internet Archive exist?

"They're books, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time." "They're web pages, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time."

There's value in record-keeping. People can analyze it on a technical perspective (like a literary analysis). People can enjoy old games (like reading a book from the 1500s). People can analyze trends in the industry. There are endless reasons why record-keeping could be useful, and you can never plan for all of them ahead of time.